For muscle growth, 10-20 sets per muscle per muscle group per week is generally sufficient, but individual response should be monitored.

“if your strength continues to be stable or increases session to session to session and you're on that fewer than 20 work sets per muscle per week type of per muscle not per body part”

“between 10 and 20 sets per week is fine but for many people you have to use a second qualifier which is what's actually happening to you if you aren't getting super sore or super mega tired in your muscles for a day or two after training if your strength continues to be stable or increases session to session to session and you're on that fewer than 20 work sets per muscle per week type of per muscle not per body part in other words bicep would need to be 20 sets per week correct wow yeah then I think we have a pretty good explanation for why why somebody at this table has small biceps I'm not saying how dare you I take that offensively by the way so um then if all of the signs show that you're not actually excessively fatigued your volume is either okay or less than it could be if you're not getting great results visually but you're always running into strength plateaus if you're always tired and sore and if you're north of 20 sets per muscle per week on average hard sets then probably doing less is good because you have almost every indicator of doing too much and so you'll be able to Inuit it rather quickly if it's too little or or too much those are most of the variables involved in the gym part except for one and that is when is the last time you took a break because there's a concept called accumulated fatigue or cumulative fatigue your muscles and the rest of your body recover very well between sessions but not 100% maybe 90 or 95 and if you're a mathematics fan if you multiply 0.95 by 0.95 by 0.92 by 0.9 by 0.95 enough you're down to 50% recovery within like 6 or eight weeks and then how could you possibly be making gains so every for the average person cranking away probably the person listening to this podcast one week out of every eight one week every two months don't go to the gym stay active maybe do a body weight squat or a push-up or two in your hotel room or something ideally try going on vacation if not try to not exercise and be a little easier at work be a little easier on family stuff Have Some Fun cheat Foods eat a little more than usual be a little less active so that your body can recover in a way that it can never recover between sessions but it gets a whole week to do this and once a year at least take two whole weeks like that we call that active rest so that first thing one week off is called a D lo and the second thing off where you take two weeks in a row of basically just not even coming to the gym and if you do just do the lightest easiest stuff ever takes 10 minutes that reduces your systemic cumulative fatigue so much that it brings it back down to zero or almost zero because some people will say look 16 weeks I've been cranking first 12 weeks great results last four weeks I don't know if I'm moving the needle maybe you're just really tired and pushing the pedal down harder is usually not the best way to do things it might be time for a break people come back and your muscles resensitize to the stimulus if you take time off so when you come back go back to two or three sets of everything not four or five sets of everything you're going to get really sore and really pumped from just a few sets and you're going to be growing again you do that for another six to8 weeks you get tired again your strength starts to Plateau take another week of easy training or no training at all and that's how the cycle repeats itself that's probably most of the stuff I would say about how to analyze your training inside the gym to get closer to your Optimum there's lots to say about external gym variables but one thing I'll say really quick is this before I ever consult people nowadays A about how to pursue incrementally more optimal outcomes for their muscle people who want to gain muscle but are frustrated they aren't jacked enough nowadays I always take time to find a reference frame of what have your gains been like how much work have you been putting in how long have you been training and to see if how do genetics play a role in this and how does age play a role in this I've consulted with people before who were in their 60s weighing something like 150 PBS fairly lean and they're they aspire to be in the low to mid 200s fairly lean I told them that outside of an anabolic steroid cycle that's probably got an even chance of killing you as it does getting you jacked you're not going to get that jacked and your progress rate is just going to be much slower than the 20-year-olds at your gym but sometimes we forget that age has such a profound effect on our results and we look around and there all young people like well I want to look like that well guess what 1982 was a long time ago so unless you have a time machine or age reversal which I think age reversal Tech attribute this to the hypertrophy of type two fibers which are necessary for the power generation that's necessary for producing the gains we're talking about that's definitely a component of it another component is overall systemic ability to recover you have so much um DNA meth a and and all the sort of kind of damage and accretion of the wear and tear of age that your organel and your cells don't work as well as they used to your organs don't work as well as they used to a lot of times you're taking for granted the fact that now in your mid-60s you run a top you know a top 500 Corporation and you have more stress than most people can handle in a day you have that in an”

“if you aren't getting super sore or super mega tired in your muscles for a day or two after training if your strength continues to be stable or increases session to session to session and you're on that fewer than 20 work sets per muscle per week”